FreeHA - a Free, Portable High Availability system

This is the current home page of FreeHA. The goals of FreeHA are to
provide a free, portable, easy to use (compared to alternatives) program
to run nodes in a 'High Availability' Cluster. Its initial target is to
run on any and all UNIXen, rather than any particular one.

There are no special drivers required. You can run the entire thing as a
regular user process if you so desire.

FreeHA will let you run a service (program), or group of services, on a
computer, but have one or more others running in standby mode.
The service can be whatever kind of demon or program you would normally run
on a UNIX box.

When and if the service fails on the initial node, one of the standby
servers will automatically start the service(s) running on itself. Because
of this automatic and normally fast restarting of the service, this sort of
configuration is called a "Highly Available" cluster/configuration.
"Highly Available", or "High Availability" == 'H.A.'

Why FreeHA?

Having done many cluster installs at this point in my life, I have noticed
that people tend to spend big $$$ on really complicated 'Cluster Software',
and then proceed to use only the very basic functionality of,
"Run this service on a node, but start it up on the other one if
the main one fails".

It seems crazy to me to pay all that money, and only use a fraction of
what you are paying for. Not to mention that there is no clustering
software available, free or otherwise, for my favourite platform.
So as usual, I figured if no-one else has done it by now,
it's high time I wrote my own software to fill the void :-)

Requirements

Some kind of service, or services, that you want to make sure
are running as close to "always" as possible.

Right now, you also need some minimal (teeny tiny) amount of shellscripting
knowledge to start up
your own services, until I get enough contributions of template scripts to
cover a bunch of different areas.

Sample areas would include:

Oracle (...Mysql,PostGres, etc)

Jrun, other "application servers",...

LDAP services

Outbound mail gateways (smtp.yourcompany.com)

{Your App Here?}

Install guide

More details on exactly what is involved in setting up an HA cluster, can
be found in the HTML version of the install
guide There is also a
blog
about it

DOWNLOAD

LICENSE

The license for freeha is "BSD 3-clause" one: You may do what
you like with it, so long as you dont hold me responsible for anything
that may happen as a result of you using it. You also must give me credit
in your copies of the code.
Other than that, Copy and modify as you like freely.
I hope that you will contribute patches back to me.
However, please note: I will most likely ignore large patches. Please keep
patches small and localized. If you have a lot of features to add... please
feed them to me one at a time.